Sen. Marty gives up ghost on single-subject suit.

Byline: Kevin Featherly

Sen. John Marty, DFL-Roseville, has sent his lawyers home. But now he has a new idea.

The Democrat, who has long wanted to rid the Capitol of garbage-bill legislation, is turning his attention away from judges and toward his own legislative peers. He wants to convince a few of them to pledge never to vote for such bills again.

"I only need a handful," Marty said.

Marty spent much of 2017 and half of 2018 mulling a lawsuit to challenge what he regards as the Legislature's chronic abuse of the state Constitution's single-subject clause. That one-sentence command in Article IV, Section 17 reads simply: "No law shall embrace more than one subject, which shall be expressed in its title."

Ignoring the clause which legislators routinely do the 2018 Legislature passed a massive 985-page-plus-appendix finance-and-policy bill, which reporters dubbed "Omnibus Prime." Comprising an estimated 75 percent of the Legislature's entire 2018 lawmaking output, it was vetoed by Gov. Mark Dayton on May 23.

Like Dayton, Marty has wanted the courts to pick up the garbage by ordering legislators to stop passing massive finance-and-policy bills. But Marty had two problems. First, he didn't have money to finance a one-man lawsuit. Second, he wasn't sure the courts would take it up.

The former question is no longer operative because the courts have thunderously answered the second. "They certainly sent the message that the court is not inclined to intervene in a way that would help us," Marty said.

The governor won Ninetieth Minnesota Senate v. Dayton case when the state Supreme Court upheld his 2017 line-item veto of the Legislature's budget. But justices declined to rule on lawmakers' contention that Dayton veto was coercivethus avoiding their suit's key political question.

On April 18, 2018, the Supreme Court ruled against State Auditor Rebecca Otto, who sued counties for taking advantage of legislation that allowed them to hire private auditors. That enabling legislation was a single-subject violation, she argued. But the court batted her down.

According to that ruling, " the subject 'the operation of state government' is not too broad to pass constitutional muster in a challenge to legislation." Days later, Senate Finance Committee Chair Julie Rosen picked up that cue when Marty challenged her, on the Senate floor, to define Omnibus Prime's single subject.

"I think everything in here deals with the operations of government of some kind...

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